Between 1998 and 2012, the whole franchise was dormant. Ridley Scott had already accumulated a filmography that has grown beyond his beloved horror film. He’s been tolerable with his output and finally joined a group of directors to have one of his films win the Best Picture nomination. Word on a 5th Alien film was starting and their intention was that it was going to be a remake. It made sense to have Scott rejoin the franchise and instead make a prequel to the franchise. To say that it’s a prequel is inaccurate since it doesn’t lead up to the debut film. More like a story before the first one.
1. Meeting our Makers
When I first watched the trailer, I thought it would be interesting sci-fi film. Mind you, I was not aware of the Alien connection at all since I haven’t watched either of them. This film is my first exposure to the franchise. And you can imagine the level of hype that it got since a lot of people and fans were wanting some answers when Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo descended onto LV-426 and saw the massive dead aliens on the ship. When it came out, I liked it since I treated it as a regular sci-fi film with no strings to the overall franchise. While watching the prior entries, my like inevitability changed.
I think I’m getting ahead of myself when talking about why this is a complicated film. I’ll try to go at the angles where this film has its positives and the very glaring issues. Basically, the film is straightforward, we follow archeologists Elizabeth and her boyfriend Charlie discover an old Scottish cave drawing of humanoid beings pointing to a specific star cluster. From there, we follow the duo and the scientists involved in the expedition to find out who created humanity. Seeing that this is a horror film, it all goes wrong but I digress.
I will say that as a sci-fi film that has tiny bits of existentialism, it’s not bad. For one thing, I love how the mission is framed to find out who created us and to see if there’s a way that death can be defied. We see how eager Elizabeth is when she discovers the unnatural structures and just wants to find some specimen to study. Noomi Rapace does a good job of portraying the archeologist. We get a reasoning of why she does it since her faith is tied into it. Among everyone in the mission, she’s the only one that wears a cross and the whole mission is personal. It’s established that she lost her dad and she wonders where people go when they die when she was younger.
Cast wise, it’s a good ensemble of characters since the others have small roles but are well rounded enough where there’s not a token to be had. While I’ll talk about another character in a moment, I will say that the movie moves at a good pace. None of it feels like a slow burn due to the philosophical nature of it. More so, what they do inside of the alien structure practically causes the story to move. It’s the fact that they altered it already spelled out their doom and I like how they went about it.
Might as well talk about the horror elements, it’s the level of violence where it’s not exaggerated to a ridiculous degree but one where it’s played mostly straight. There’s one scene where people hate and it’s when two scientists discover a mutated worm that has been altered by the black ooze. I’ll talk about that too don’t you worry. Mostly the thing with the two scientists is that they get lost and try to see if the thing is harmless, which bites them or breaks the arm of one of the scientists.
This other moment is when Elizabeth has been impregnated by Charlie who was poisoned by ingesting the black ooze. That whole scene is practically my favorite highlight of the whole film. The whole ordeal is shown as we see Elizabeth use the machine to practically abort this thing. Like, we see close ups of the C-Section and it’s just gruesome how she’s standing with stitches in her abdomen. The alien or trilobite is just freaky when it’s small but so disgusting when it grows up.
I feel that a missed opportunity occurs when the crew sees holographic recordings of the engineers inside the structure. This is just me but I wish that the film started out with them instead of the unnamed Engineer in a distant planet. Having us see what they were running away from and causing their own demise would’ve been a better start to the film and they have that dramatic irony where the main cast are walking, not knowing what’s beyond them may kill them.
2. David
Michael Fassbender steals the whole movie. There’s no other way around it. The whole 2010s is when he put himself out there more with the films he appeared in. My first exposure to him is when he portrayed Magneto in X-Men: First Class. From there, he was in select films from Fox Searchlight and in Ridley Scott’s next film after this one. Obviously, since this is an Alien film, there must be another android where we don’t know if he is a good guy or has ulterior motives. A majority of the time it’s always the latter.
I like the whole montage where he does learn an ancient language and shooting a basketball on a bike. I think Scott had watched Resurrection and saw Sigourney Weaver shoot the ball behind her back and decided to one up that. One detail that is interesting is that he watches Lawrence of Arabia, so much so that he styles his hair like Peter O’Toole’s character. More so quotes the film in some instances. What makes him interesting like the androids before him is that he has an ulterior motive. Like the character in the other film, he’s mostly an outsider and is practically alien among the other crew members.
Since the main cast are there trying to find the creators, David becomes inquisitive with the environment. He triggers the holographic displays that show the engineers running away. Just his actions move the plot forward where he decides to test out the black ooze that’s spotted near a shrine. It makes him full of duplicity where he uses the liquid to see what it does. I love the whole conversation between David and Charlie. It’s mostly a talk where David asks why they made him to which Charlie said because they could. It all leads up with the android asking the scientist how much he’s willing to sacrifice to discover what he wants.
One thing I will say that is the best moment involving David is when he’s in the cockpit of the ship. He triggers another holographic display which shows the Engineers preparing for takeoff. All of it is great with the holographs and the sweeping music, like seeing David seeing it all and basking in it is like it’s an information nirvana. This is just an observation but there’s a level of irony where the music is swooning and we see these creatures going about their day which is menial by observation. Speaking of Engineers, this is probably the most controversial and detrimental thing to the whole movie.
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3. Demystification: Complicated Legacy
What made the first Alien great aside from the xenomorph, was just seeing the alien world be deserted and seeing the space jockey showed us that there was life beyond Earth. All of it is just great scenery and leads to a lot of people having questions. Or just random ideas where no one really had an answer until now. I feel that any prequel that involves this kind of small detail isn’t really warranted since it undoes the whole mystery. More so that, the whole film isn’t really a prequel by any means.
What I mean by that is one would think that this film is a prequel since we see the ship crashed in the same way that we see it in the debut film. Although, this film takes place in an entirely different planet than LV-426. The planet where it all takes place is the next one over. More so that all of it is so esoteric where when they’re in the statue room, there’s a mural that has a xenomorph among other things. It seemed like it’s set up for the next film, but none of it is explained.
To me, this is the film’s biggest problem. While there’s questions where they are answered, there’s even more questions added. It’s clear that when you remove the film from the mainline Alien franchise, it’s a good film independently speaking. When it’s part of the whole franchise, there’s no connective tissue on the whole franchise aside from Weyland having ties to it. Additionally, this film is used heavily in some philosophy classes. One of them has David in the cover in one of the books needed.
I feel that the philosophy angle is so half baked that the whole film isn’t really that deep. Yes, it is philosophically interesting to find out the who’s and the why’s of our existence. But at the end of the day, the whole thing is about concepts. What’s more important more than anything is the execution of the concepts. When you have multiple articles explaining what the whole film is about on a deeper level, I feel that the movie really failed to be able to stand on its own. For a good film, you don’t need articles to explain a point of view to change the reception.
One more thing, I forgot to talk about the mascot of the whole series. It’s not technically a xenomorph, but another variant that we see. Dubbed the Deacon, this thing is radically different from the others that we’ve seen. I feel that it’s appropriate to have it appear in the literal final seconds of the film. Almost like if Scott had literally forgot about the lack of aliens and decided to put one to meet some quota. It feels tacked on, since the following film doesn’t bring up Deacon again.
4. Overall
Prometheus is an interesting film in the franchise, flawed but a decent film when separated with it’s companions.
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